The event was organised by RIXC Centre for New Media Culture. 

https://renew.rixc.lv/programme.php

https://www.mediaarthistory.org/

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Abstract

This paper presents and recalls the interconnections and developments of locative and contextual media experiments in Latvia and Finland between 2003-2006. The author was closely involved in participating and organising within the pioneering Locative Media Workshops initiated by RIXC in Karosta-Liepaja (2003) and Helsinki (2004), participating in the international Locative Network, as well as developing two innovative projects which explored mobile and contextual media (Mapmyths & Aware platform). When the online mapping and mobile media developed around 2006 into an increasingly mainstream and commercially-driven practice, the Locative Network dissolved, along with its website presence online. Several of the aforementioned examples have been reported independently, but have not been presented together since. In the context of Media Art History, the locative axis is not just a spatial vector, between locations, but is represented here as a set of working relationships and friendships across networks and projects, that extends temporally, over several years and a series of events. An auto-ethnographical and auto-archaeological approach is applied to the activity of the period 2003-2006, reconstructing a contextual narrative that acknowledges not only the subjectivites involved, media fragments published and unpublished, but the production and archival process. The narrative of emerging practices of locative and contextual media is retrospectively joined again with the locative-temporal imagination and ambition of the first half of the 2000s, as a reminder of the still pressing need for grassroots control and open access of contextual meta-data, content, and publishing systems in the contemporary period.